SELLING CERTIFIED PAYROLL SOFTWARE

VIEW PROTOTYPE

Connecting contractors with the right tool for government contract work

Construction companies that do projects for government entities can easily get bogged down with payroll and reporting requirements.

With eBacon certified payroll software, all the forms and paperwork involved with meeting those requirements becomes very simplified.

To help TAG Employer Services generate leads and get brand recognition in the construction industry for their certified payroll product, eBacon, I worked with TAG’s marketing team to redesign the eBacon website. Our redesign efforts resulted in 228 new leads and over $1.5 million in RFPs – a 900% increase from the previous year!

MY ROLE

I conducted customer research, did the information architecture, and designed the UI for the web pages based on the research and internal workshops with the marketing team. The marketing team I collaborated with included a director of marketing, a senior copywriter, and a digital marketing specialist.

UNDERSTANDING THE DOMAIN

Before I jumped into interviewing customers and researching competitors, I needed to get a clearer understanding of the domain of certified payroll. This would help inform me of what types of questions I should ask current users of the eBacon product.

To help get a better understanding of this lingo, I reviewed the marketing collateral, existing web pages, met with internal subject matter experts, and even took part in writing about some complex topics on the eBacon blog, involving terminology such as “fringe benefits” and “prevailing wages.”

THE RESEARCH

After I became more familiar with our internal processes, our competitors, and what made eBacon unique to our competition, I prepared a list of questions to ask clients about their current experience with our product.

Together, the marketing specialist and I interviewed several clients to learn about their experience with eBacon:

6 Clients Interviewed

From these interviews, I created 2 personas:

Sophia the Owner “I fear taking on government projects because of all the admin work that comes with them." Owner of Superior Drywall Co. Oversees operations of business and manages 20 employees 45 Years Old Lives and works in San Diego, CA	Henry the HR Manager “I really dislike spending so much time on payroll compliance, when I could be doing better things.” HR Manager of B&E Electric Manages benefits and payroll for 90 employees 39 Years Old Lives and works in Phoenix, AZ
Day in the Life Sophia is always spending a lot of her time carefully reviewing and making corrections to payroll to ensure her company is staying in compliance. She ends up spending way more time than she had ever anticipated on reports and other documentation required for her business’s government contract work.	Day in the Life Henry spends most of his days revising pay wages and putting together reports for government contract work. He always has a lot of other ideas and ambitions for his job, but he always just ends up getting bogged down with hours and hours of paperwork for the government contract work performed by his company.
Pain Points While the government contract work has been profitable, a lot of Sophia’s other hopes and dreams for her business have been put on the back-burner, simply because of how much administrative time is needed for government work. Since it’s out of her budget to hire someone full time to help out with the compliance paperwork, she has had to hire expensive lawyers to help manage it, which has eaten into her profits.	Pain Points Henry is always having to tell his boss why he can’t manage to pursue some of his bigger initiatives for the company - the certified payroll required for government contract work is just way too time consuming. Certified payroll not only interferes with his life inside of work - the long hours also frequently makes Henry miss time with his kids outside of work.
Goals Sophia wants to stop wasting so much of her workdays on compliance reporting, while keeping her business profitable. She wants to have more time to negotiate new bids and focus on growing her business, without having to worry about compliance issues.	Goals Instead of being consumed by government reports, Henry would like to spend more of his day at work on things he’s passionate about, including employee health and associate engagement events. He would also like to have a better work/life balance so he can spend more time with his kids.

RESEARCH ON THE PREVIOUS SITE DESIGN

Observed HotJar user session recordings

Noticed there didn’t seem to be a clear directional path for users to follow that fell in line with how we wanted to present our brand story.

Dug into site’s Google Analytics

Users that used the keywords “certified payroll software” had the longest sessions on our pages.

Search terms that included the word “fringe” and “prevailing wages” were what drove most of the traffic to the site.

CARD SORTING

Using the research listed above and input from internal SMEs, I facilitated a card sorting session with the marketing team to create the site’s information architecture.

This exercise also helped the copywriter determine what content would need to be generated for the website.

MARKER COMPS

I did a few quick marker drawings and came to agreement with the team which design we should move forward with.

PROTOTYPE

Using the branding guidelines I created for eBacon’s web standards, I created a prototype for the marketing specialist and I to reference as we built out the pages with WordPress.

I also worked with the copywriter to make adjustments to the design based on content where needed and we also determined what copy edits might be necessary.

VIEW PROTOTYPE

POST LAUNCH

Less than a month after we launched the redesigned eBacon website, we went from getting one qualified lead a week, to at least one qualified lead every day.

Not only did our leads increase, but our user engagement with the site contents increased as well. Average visitor sessions rose from under 40 seconds to over 2 minutes per session.

From our research, we also did find that 95% of our leads came from desktop devices, which is why we prioritized the desktop design for the site. However, we were able to optimize for tablet and mobile devices once we implemented the design in WordPress to accommodate for 40% of visitors that came to the site using those devices.

Want see more of my projects from TAG?

DOWNLOAD THIS PDF

<< home

I have intentionally omitted and obfuscated confidential visuals and information in this case study. All visuals and information in this case study are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of TAG Employer Services.